Hogfather

Intricate devices had been scattered across the top. They looked vaguely navigational, but on what oceans and under which stars?

Several pages of parchment had been filled up with Death’s own handwriting. It was immediately recognizable. No one else Susan had ever met had handwriting with serifs.

It looked as though he’d been trying to work something out.

NOT KLATCH. NOT HOWONDALAND. NOT THE EMPIRE.

LET US SAY 20 MILLION CHILDREN AT 2LB OF TOYS PER CHILD.

EQUALS 17,857 TONS. 1,785 TONS PER HOUR.

MEMO: DON’T FORGET THE SOOTY FOOTPRINTS.

MORE PRACTICE ON THE HO HO HO.

CUSHION.

She put the paper back carefully.

Sooner or later it’d get to you. Death was fascinated by humans, and study was never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both.^{29} Death had picked up … humanity. Not the real thing, but something that might pass for it until you examined it closely.

The house even imitated human houses. Death had created a bedroom for himself, despite the fact that he never slept. If he really picked things up from humans, had he tried insanity? It was very popular, after all.

Perhaps, after all these millennia, he wanted to be nice.

She let herself into the Room of Lifetimers. She’d liked the sound of it, when she was a little girl. But now the hiss of sand from millions of hourglasses, and the little pings and pops as full ones vanished and new empty ones appeared, was not so enjoyable. Now she knew what was going on. Of course, everyone died sooner or later. It just wasn’t right to be listening to it happening.

She was about to leave when she noticed the open door in a place where she had never seen a door before.

It was disguised. A whole section of shelving, complete with its whispering glasses, had swung out.

Susan pushed it back and forth with a finger. When it was shut, you’d have to look hard to see the crack.

There was a much smaller room on the other side. It was merely the size of, say, a cathedral. And it was lined floor to ceiling with more hourglasses that Susan could just see dimly in the light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.

‘Light,’ she commanded. A couple of candles sprang into life.

The hourglasses were … wrong.

The ones in the main room, however metaphorical they might be, were solid-looking things of wood and brass and glass. But these looked as though they were made of highlights and shadows with no real substance at all.

She peered at a large one.

The name in it was: OFFLER.

‘The crocodile god?’ she thought.

Well, gods had a life, presumably. But they never actually died, as far as she knew. They just dwindled away to a voice on the wind and a footnote in some textbook on religion.

There were other gods lined up. She recognized a few of them.

But there were smaller lifetimers on the shelf. When she saw the labels she nearly burst out laughing.

‘The Tooth Fairy? The Sandman? John Barleycorn? The Soul Cake Duck? The God of — what?’

She stepped back, and something crunched under her feet.

There were shards of glass on the floor. She reached down and picked up the biggest. Only a few letters remained of the name etched into the glass— HOGFA …

‘Oh, no … it’s true. Granddad, what have you done?’

When she left, the candles winked out. Darkness sprang back.

And in the darkness, among the spilled sand, a faint sizzle and a tiny spark of light …

Mustrum Ridcully adjusted the towel around his waist.

‘How’re we doing, Mr Modo?’

The University gardener saluted.

‘The tanks are full, Mr Archchancellor sir!’ he said brightly. ‘And I’ve been stoking the hot-water boilers all day!’

The other senior wizards clustered in the doorway.

‘Really, Mustrum, I really think this is most unwise,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It was surely sealed up for a purpose.’

‘Remember what it said on the door,’ said the Dean.

‘Oh, they just wrote that on it to keep people out,’ said Ridcully, opening a fresh bar of soap.

‘Well, yes,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘That’s right. That’s what people do.’

‘It’s a bathroom,’ said Ridcully. ‘You are all acting as if it’s some kind of a torture chamber.’

‘A bathroom,’ said the Dean, ‘designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson. Archchancellor Weatherwax^{30} only used it once and then had it sealed up! Mustrum, I beg you to reconsider! It’s a Johnson!’

There was something of a pause, because even Ridcully had to adjust his mind around this.